Not About Us: Autistic Representation, the Neurotypical Gaze, and What Television Owes Us
I. The Invitation I Declined
I was invited to help recruit autistic people for Love on the Spectrum. I said no.
I want to be careful about how I describe that decision, because the easy version of it isn’t quite true. I didn’t say no because the show was cruel or because the people behind it had bad intentions. From everything I could see, they didn’t. The Australian original had a warmth to it that was real, or at least real enough that a lot of people who care about autistic people watched it and felt like they were seeing something good happen. The audience responded with what looked like affection, and I don’t think that affection was entirely manufactured.
What I understood, well enough to decline, was what the show was actually doing underneath the warmth. And the thing it was doing wasn’t something that could be fixed by having kinder producers or more autistic consultants on set or a bigger diversity statement in the press kit. It was structural. It was in the format itself, in the relationship between the camera and the people being filmed, in who gets to decide what a moment means after the moment has passed. I said no because I understood what I’d be helping to build, and I didn’t want to build it.
That’s where this piece starts. Not with a comprehensive indictment of every show that has ever featured an autistic character, not with a ranking of who did it better or worse, but with the question that the invitation forced me to answer: what exactly was I saying no to? Because it wasn’t just one reality television show. It was something the whole representational ecosystem keeps producing, in different formats and with different tones and at different levels of prestige, and understanding what that something is seems more useful than cataloguing individual failures.
II. The Structure of the Gaze
Here’s the thing about autistic representation on television: the conversation we keep having about it is operating at the wrong level. We argue about whether a portrayal is accurate. We argue about whether it’s flattering or harmful, whether it shows the full range of autistic experience, whether it includes nonspeaking autistic people or only the ones who can deliver coherent monologues about their feelings. These are real questions and they’re worth asking, but they’re not the question that actually matters. The question that actually matters is: who is this made for?
Every piece of autistic representation that exists on television right now, and I mean every piece, including the ones that are carefully researched and warmly intended and occasionally quite good, is structured around a neurotypical audience as its assumed center. The camera is positioned where a neurotypical viewer needs it to be. The music swells at the moments a neurotypical viewer needs help knowing what to feel. The autistic character explains themselves, repeatedly and patiently, at the exact junctures where a neurotypical viewer would otherwise be confused or put off. None of this is accidental. It’s what the shows are built to do.
The Good Doctor is the most watched autistic representation in American television history, and it’s instructive precisely because of how much effort clearly went into it. Shaun Murphy isn’t a cartoon. The research shows. But the camera is never where Shaun is. The camera is where the people watching Shaun are, positioned alongside his colleagues as they experience discomfort and eventual acceptance, alongside his supervisors as they decide whether he’s worth the trouble, alongside the neurotypical audience as it moves through the emotional arc the show has designed for them. You are never asked to be Shaun. You are asked to be the person learning to accept him, and that positioning is so constant and so complete that it’s almost invisible once you’ve seen it.
Atypical had a different problem and a more documented one. When it launched in 2017, there were no autistic writers in the room, and it showed in ways that autistic viewers kept naming and that the production team eventually acknowledged. They added autistic consultants and later autistic writers, and the show did get better, but the architecture was already set. Sam Gardner’s autism is what happens to other characters. His sister’s coming-of-age story runs on it. His mother’s breakdown and reconstruction runs on it. His father’s journey back into the family runs on it. Sam has an interior life, but it faces outward, angled toward an audience the show assumes needs the angle.
Parenthood’s Max Braverman is another example of a portrayal done with genuine affection that still can’t escape this orientation. The show is often quite good at depicting what it’s like to raise an autistic child from the inside of a family that loves him, which is not nothing, but Max himself remains almost entirely opaque throughout the series. He’s what happens to the Bravermans. He’s rarely the one things are happening to.
Even Julia, the autistic Muppet on Sesame Street who was developed with autistic input and genuine care, is frequently framed through Elmo’s perspective as he learns about her. There’s a version of that framing that makes sense in context, because Sesame Street has always used its characters to teach neurotypical children about the world, but it still means that an autistic child watching Julia is watching a character whose primary narrative function is to be understood by someone who isn’t like her.
The accuracy of a portrayal doesn’t change its orientation. A show can get the sensory sensitivities right, can depict stimming without mockery, can include a consultant who catches the diagnostic errors, and still be fundamentally a document produced for people who are not in it. What changes about a thing when it’s made to be watched by people outside of it is not just the content but the entire structure of meaning-making. That’s what the observer problem is. And autistic representation has never solved it, because it hasn’t tried to, because the industry has never asked the question that would require solving it.
III. Who Is In the Room
The disability rights movement built its political identity around a principle so clean it became a slogan: nothing about us without us. In policy spaces, in clinical settings, in educational frameworks and advocacy organizations, that principle has genuinely reshaped who speaks with authority about disabled and neurodivergent experience. You can argue about how completely it’s been honored, but you can’t argue that it hasn’t changed the terrain.
Then there’s the entertainment industry, which largely missed the memo.
Rain Man is not a television show, but it’s the originating text of the modern autistic representation genre and it set a template that television has been reproducing for nearly four decades: the autistic person as a vehicle for a neurotypical character’s emotional transformation. It was written by neurotypical people, directed by a neurotypical person, and starred a neurotypical actor who won an Academy Award for his performance. Dustin Hoffman is a great actor. That isn’t the point. The point is that the story of an autistic man was told entirely by people who were not autistic, and the result was a film whose central emotional payoff is about what the autistic man’s existence does for his brother.
The casting question alone tells you a lot. Freddie Highmore, who plays Shaun Murphy in The Good Doctor, is not autistic. Keir Gilchrist, who plays Sam in Atypical, is not autistic. Park Eun-bin, whose performance in Extraordinary Attorney Woo became a global phenomenon in 2022, is not autistic, and has spoken about preparing for the role by observing autistic people, which is a description that reveals everything about the orientation: autistic people are research subjects, neurotypical actors are the ones whose craft transforms the material into art.
There are exceptions, and they matter precisely because they’re so rare and so instructive. As We See It, which Amazon released in 2022, cast three autistic actors in the three lead roles. The interiority was different. The humor was different. The texture of what it felt like to be inside those characters’ lives was different, not because the autistic actors were playing it more accurately in some documentary sense but because they were playing it from the inside. The show was cancelled after one season.
Special, Ryan O’Connell’s semi-autobiographical Netflix series, is a useful comparison because O’Connell is both gay and has cerebral palsy, and he created and starred in a show about those identities. What the show does differently from most disability representation is that it never explains itself. It doesn’t position the audience outside of O’Connell’s character and invite them to feel benevolent toward him. It assumes you’re coming along for the ride or you’re not, and either way it’s not going to adjust its pace.
The autistic consultant is the industry’s preferred compromise, and it’s worth understanding what it actually accomplishes. A consultant reviews scripts for factual errors. They catch the moments where the portrayal contradicts diagnostic reality or where a behavior is being depicted inaccurately. What they cannot do is change the narrative architecture. They cannot redirect where the camera positions the audience. They cannot alter the decision about which moments get the swelling score that tells neurotypical viewers this is moving, or which behaviors get the comedic pause that tells them this is charming. Those decisions belong to the people with the power to make them, and the autistic consultant is not in that room.
Accuracy without authorship is still someone else’s story. You can fact-check a story to death and still have it be oriented entirely toward an audience you’re not part of.
IV. The Comparative Failure: What Other Communities Have Built
Television has, over the past thirty years, built something that could genuinely be called queer television. Not representation of queer people in shows made for everyone, but shows made by queer creators, for queer audiences, in which queer experience is the center of gravity rather than the deviation being explained. Pose was written with unprecedented inclusion of Black and Latinx trans women in the writers room and cast, and the result was television in which trans experience was the assumed water, not the foreign country the audience was being given a guided tour of. It’s a Sin was written by Russell T Davies, a gay man, about gay men in London during the AIDS crisis, and it assumed an audience that already knew what that world felt like from the inside. RuPaul’s Drag Race exists as a full cultural institution built on the premise that queer people are not the ones who need things explained to them.
Television has built similar ecosystems, imperfectly but meaningfully, for Black audiences. Insecure, Atlanta, A Different World, Living Single, How to Get Away with Murder: these are shows where Black interior life is the assumed starting point, not the explained subject. For Latinx audiences, the Netflix reboot of One Day at a Time did something that almost no other family sitcom has done, which is treat its audience as people who already understand the cultural context rather than people who need it decoded. Fresh Off the Boat spent years doing similar work for Asian American audiences.
In each case, the shift happened when creators from within those communities got authorship. Not consultancy. Not diversity casting in shows whose structural logic remained unchanged. Actual creative control, actual decision-making power, actual ability to say: this is what this story is about and this is who it’s for.
For autistic people, this body of work does not exist. There’s no autistic Pose. There’s no show in which autistic social logic is the assumed baseline and neurotypical characters are the ones who occasionally need things explained to them. There’s no autistic creator with the industry standing of Issa Rae or Donald Glover or Lena Waithe who is producing autistic television from the inside and having it reach the audiences those creators have reached.
The closest thing that exists is probably Everything’s Gonna Be Okay, Josh Thomas’s Freeform series that ran for two seasons between 2020 and 2021. Thomas is autistic, and the show’s two autistic characters, Matilda and Drea, had an interiority that felt genuinely different from the autistic characters on shows made by neurotypical creators. The humor landed differently. The social dynamics between the autistic characters had a texture that wasn’t oriented outward. The show was cancelled after two seasons and remains largely unknown outside the autistic community that found it and held onto it.
